True, embellished and fictional stories for your amusertainment

Posts tagged ‘Bugs’

I have a strained relationship with bugs – they like me but I don’t like them. If there’s a bug within 100 miles, it will find me. At times I feel there’s a conspiracy within the bug world to torture me. Let me give you an example.

Stephen and I were in Cancun, lying on the beach when a bee stung me. Stephen ran to the bar to get a shot of booze and while he was there he got one for me to use to extract the poison out of the wound. When the bartender heard what happened, he said “we don’t have bees in Cancun”. Yeah, right.

My latest debacle involves a scorpion. In fact, I’m sitting crossed legged (lotus position) in my desk chair to keep my feet off the floor because I’m afraid I’ll be stung. The other day, while working at my computer, I saw a creature with a long body whose rear end was curled up over its back. We (meaning Stephen) searched everywhere but was unable to find it. Wondering whether its inevitable, powerful sting would kill me, I Googled scorpions in Illinois. The species that live in Illinois are not deadly but are so rare they are hardly ever seen. Exactly like bees in Cancun.

To make matters worse, soon after the scorpion sighting, I found a wasp laying nearby on a rug trying its best to crawl over and sting me before it took its last dying breath. Although the wasp looked similar to the scorpion, I’m sure it’s simply a coincidence.

It’s been several days since my scorpion appeared, and frankly I’m tired of losing all feeling in my legs from keeping my feet off the floor. I don’t know how long scorpions live, but I’ll sit this way a few more days to be safe.

May the farce be with you!

Your IFF,

Pam

The thing in the corner looks like my scorpion

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Usually I put a lot of thought into things that are important in my life. Take when I started graduate school. I left North Dakota and moved to the deep south (relatively speaking) in Ames, Iowa. I lived in student housing and discovered something I had never seen before – little brown bugs. When I found out that they were roaches and there were hundreds living in the apartment (far outnumbering the humans who lived there), I freaked out.

To overcome (no, to manage) my fear I decided to undergo desensitization therapy using self-hypnosis. The therapist required me to collect a few dead roaches for use in therapy (my roommates got them for me). I will never forget “The Day Of The Dead Roaches”. I was hypnotized (in a state of deep relaxation) and the therapist told me he was going to touch my skin with the dead roaches. The idea was to replace the association of fear with relaxation. What I didn’t know was that he was actually using dead flowers, not dead bugs.

The therapy definitely helped because I “graduated”. The bugs you see in the picture below are made from fence wire and baggies. Stephen made two roaches in celebration of my “graduation”. One for me and one for my therapist.

I had a few roaches in college

My decision to be a writer (aka my “Write Choice”) wasn’t nearly as systematic as the process I used to manage my fear of roaches. I didn’t plan to be a writer. In fact, my plan was to work in Human Resources for the rest of my career. After being unemployed for a while, I realized that maybe I didn’t have to continue in a profession where a significant part of my job was telling other people they were losing theirs.

I’m still experiencing a bit of a split personality between HR and writing in my quest to move from terminator to x-terminator. I’m a little freaked out about the unknown (like the roaches in the walls) but I’ve got a plan. One of the things I’m doing while researching in book stores is attempting to hypnotize people to get them to buy my book once it is published. So far, they just seem really relaxed.

May the farce be with you!

Your IFF,

Pam

How do you make big decisions in your life? Are you a thinker and planner or more impulsive?